bonch writes "Contrary to previous reports, Atom chip support is working fine in the latest 10C535 build of OS X 10.6.2. Apple's EULA still states that OS X is licensed to run only on Apple hardware, but it looks like OSX86 hackers can breathe easy ... for now."

remolacha writes "I've been given the task of tech chief for a biggish art museum (1,300 m^2, or about 13,000 sq ft) in Spain. The museum's designers want 20 'terminals' that will offer on-demand video and interactive content. The terminals' content will change with the exhibits; many will have touchscreens. More interesting forms of input are planned as well (floor sensors, big buttons). It's all on one floor, and the floors are raised, so I can run cabling and set up floor ethernet jacks. Max cable run is 60m / 190ft. The museum may expand to 4 times its projected size once open, by comandeering other floors in the building. To give an idea of where the designers heads are, they were talking about a massive DVD changer in a closet somewhere. I am thinking an intranet running a web server with a CMS and Flash media server, terminals running Firefox in kiosk mode. I'd love to do everything on Linux. Does anyone have experience with a setup like this, better ideas, or advice?"

CNETNate writes "Is the American mains socket really so much worse than the Italian design? And does the Italian socket fail at rivaling the sockets in British homes? This feature explores, in a not-at-all-parodic-and-anecdotal fashion, the designs, strengths and weaknesses of Earth's mains adapters. There is only one conclusion, and you're likely not to agree if you live in France. Or Italy. Or in fact most places." (For more plug pics and details, check out Wikipedia's list of the ones in current use.)

jbrodkin writes "SiCortex had an idea that it thought would take the supercomputing world by storm — build the most energy-efficient HPC clusters on the planet. But the recession, and the difficulties of penetrating a market dominated by Intel-based machines, proved to be too much for the company to handle. SiCortex ended up folding earlier this year, and its story may be a cautionary tale for startups trying to bring innovation to the supercomputing industry."

An anonymous reader writes "Trusted Reviews has put the new Dell XFR rugged laptop through the grinder and it hasn't fared as well as expected. Considering that these guys drove a car over a Panasonic Toughbook, they went pretty easy on the Dell, but it still couldn't take the punishment. It looks like Dell still has a way to go to steal the ball from Panasonic when it comes to all terrain computing."

waderoush writes "In May 2008, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, unveiled an e-book like design for the second-generation XO Laptop, consisting of a pair of facing touchscreens. In a new e-mail interview, Negroponte says that design has been thrown out, and that instead the foundation is working on version '1.75' of the existing green-and-white laptop with a more powerful processor, as well as a '3.0' version that would look 'more like a sheet of paper.' Negroponte also addressed a range of other questions about the OLPC project, including the significance of the project to make 1.6 million e-books readable on the XO laptop and the organization's push to reach more children in Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."

Several readers noted the indictment of hardware hacker Ryan Harris, known as DerEngel. Harris wrote the 2006 book Hacking the Cable Modem, explaining how to get upgraded speed or even free Internet service by bypassing the firmware locks on Motorola Surfboard modems. He has run a profitable business at tcniso.net since 2003, selling unlocked cable modems. (The site is now offline.) Harris has been charged with conspiracy, aiding and abetting computer intrusion, and wire fraud. Wired quotes Harris's reaction: "I read the indictment — it's complete bull****. I'll tell you right now I'm not going to plead guilty."

MikeChino writes to mention that the European Space Agency has launched a pair of satellites, one that will pinpoint accurately the future location and intensity of floods and droughts, and the other aimed at testing new tech. Launched on a Russian rocket launcher from the Plesestk cosmodrome, the SMOS probe will measure soil moisture, plant growth, and ocean salt levels across the globe. The measurements gathered by the SMOS probe can be used to track ocean circulation patterns and soil moisture — data that can be used to predict quickly drought and flood risk in certain areas, as well as the intricacies of the planet's climate cycle. The other satellite, a smaller demonstration probe dubbed Proba 2, will test 17 new technologies ranging from a new wide-angle view camera to a xenon-fed resistojet thruster.

Engadget has a recent teaser video promising HD content via XBMC running on a 600MHz Beagleboard. This could mean great things for home theater putterers, with the Beagleboard tipping the scales at a modest $150 and the ability to fit in the palm of your hand. Already running on everything from MIDs to AppleTVs and now moving to ARM-powered devices like the Beagleboard, it looks like XBMC needs to be renamed from "Xbox Media Center" to "ubiquitous media center."

holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University has begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert secondhand cars into cheap, electric ones suitable for commuting, if little else. They hope to rely heavily on smart management software to extract as much efficiency as possible from regenerative braking, and knowledge of terrain from GPS tracking. But they are hampered by a lack of public data on how commuters actually drive. Their solution is to appeal to GPS users to upload .gpx log files of their commute to the team's site. The data is plugged into a simulator that reveals how much cheaper an electric car could do your journey, and an anonymized public dataset will be created. A programming contest will award a production electric car to the coder who designs the best management algorithm using it."

jbeaupre writes "The Economist reports on progress by a company called Saltworks on using saline gradients to do the heavy lifting of desalination. In essence, Saltworks uses solar energy or waste heat to concentrate sea water. They then use the ionic gradient between the concentrated brine and two sea-water streams to pull ions from from a 3rd sea-water stream. It appears to work with entropy by trading the reduced entropy of the desalinated water against the increased entropy of 'mixing' the brine and the other sea-water streams. The article only discusses Na and Cl, but even just removing these ions is a step in the right direction."

A team with members from Microsoft, the University of Toronto, and the University of Washington have developed an interface that uses electrodes to monitor muscle signals and translate those into commands or button presses, allowing a user to bypass a physical input device and even control a game or application while their hands are full. The video demonstration shows somebody playing Guitar Hero by making strumming motions and tapping his fingers together, a jogger changing his music without having to touch the device, and a man flexing a muscle to open the trunk of his car while he carries objects in both hands. The academic paper (PDF) is available online.

avishere writes "Student teams designed and built robotic power-lifters to excavate simulated lunar soil (a.k.a. 'regolith') earlier this month, with $750,000 in prizes up for grabs. Excavating regolith, according to NASA, will be an important part of any construction projects or processing of natural resources on the Moon. Interestingly, regolith is especially difficult to dig because its dust particles want to stick together. The whole robotic system has to be sturdy enough to scoop moon dirt and powerful enough to move through the dust while still meeting the weight requirements. The winning excavator, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, lifted 1,103 pounds within the allotted time, and got its creators a sweet $500,000 for their troubles."

An anonymous reader writes "Brazilian elections went electronic many years ago, with very fast results but a few complaints from losers, of course. Next month, 10 teams that accepted the challenge will have access to hardware and software (Google translation; original in Portuguese) for the amount of time they requested (from one hour to four days). Some will try to break the vote's secrecy and some will try to throw in malicious code to change the entered votes without leaving traces."

Hugh Pickens sends in a Wall Street Journal report that Chinese banks will provide $1.5B to a consortium of Chinese and American companies to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, using turbines made in China. The wind farm will be built on 36,000 acres, and will use 240 2.5-megawatt turbines, providing enough power to meet the electrical needs of around 150,000 American homes. The project will be the first instance of a Chinese manufacturer exporting wind turbines to the United States. China aims to be the front-runner in wind- and solar-power generation "The Obama administration is hoping a shift to renewable energy will inject new life into the US manufacturing base and provide high-paying jobs, making up for losses in other sectors. But while the US has poured money into renewable energy through tax credits and other subsidies, China has positioned itself to reap many of the benefits by ramping up its export machine."

MojoKid writes "HotHardware has posted a sneak peek at a new motherboard Asus has coming down the pipe with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The Asus P7P55D-E Premium has a PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation that connects to NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips. With a USB 3.0 enabled external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port and then to the board's USB 3.0 port, there were some rather impressive gains to observe. When connected to a USB 3.0 port, the external hard drive was about 5 — 6x faster versus connecting over USB 2.0, with total throughput in excess of 130MB/sec. On the other hand, benchmarks with Seagate's new Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive show little performance difference but a burst rate that is off the charts. According to ATTO, there are slight overall performance benefits to be had connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small; somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s or so."

lbalbalba writes "This morning, Nintendo announced the third upgrade to the DS family, the DSi LL (or DSi XL). It will be released in Japan on November 21, one year after the DSi debuted, for ¥20,000 (approx. $220). The LL's main improvement is the size of its screens, which have been increased from 3.25" to 4.2" with a moderate increase to the size of the chassis. The device also includes a much bigger stylus, which looks to be the size of a ballpoint pen, and battery life has reportedly been increased to five hours at maximum screen brightness."

AdmiralXyz writes "I'm a university student, and I like to take notes on my (non-tablet) computer whenever possible, so it's easier to sort, categorize, and search through them later. Trouble is, I'm going into higher and higher math classes, and typing "f_X(x) = integral(-infinity, infinity, f(x,y) dy)" just isn't cutting it anymore: I need a way to get real-looking equations into my notes. I'm not particular about the details, the only requirement is that I need to keep up with the lecture, so it has to be fast, fast, fast. Straight LaTeX is way too slow, and Microsoft's Equation Editor isn't even worth mentioning. The platform is not a concern (I'm on a MacBook Pro and can run either Windows or Ubuntu in a virtual box if need be), but the less of a hit to battery life, the better. I've looked at several dedicated equation editing programs, but none of them, or their reviews, make any mention of speed. I've even thought about investing in a low-end Wacom tablet (does anyone know if there are ultra-cheap graphics tablets designed for non-artists?), but I figured I'd see if anyone at Slashdot has a better solution."

olahau writes "Two weeks ago, improvements to the previously reported attack on WPA/TKIP, were presented at the NorSec Conference in Oslo, Norway. In their paper coined 'An Improved Attack on TKIP,' Finn Michael Halvorsen and Olav Haugen describe the improvements, which enable an attacker to inject larger, maliciously crafted packets into a WPA/TKIP protected network, thus opening the probabilities for new and more sophisticated attacks against the well-established wireless security protocol."

Barence writes "PC Pro has done a thorough test of the software bundled by nine of the leading laptop manufacturers to find out who installs the most crapware on their PCs. Manufacturers such as Acer add as much as two minutes to their boot times by stuffing their machines full of bundled software, with own-brand proprietary software being the worst offender. HP's bundled apps, meanwhile, have a memory footprint of more than 1GB. PC Pro has also reviewed three pieces of software which promise to remove rubbish from your PC — with mixed results."